PowerPivot : Backing up your measures

Introduction

A small blogpost about backing up your DAX Measures of PowerPivot in Excel 2013. Although PowerPivot is a great tool, it can happen that PowerPivot crashes, for instance when the underlying data model changes. I do find this a problem and one way to avoid a lot of rework is by backing up your DAX Measures.

Back up your DAX measures

1. The first thing to do is downloading and install the add-in "DAX Studio". If you open Excel you can find the add in on the ADD-INS ribbon.

2.Connect to the WorkBook and choose PowerPivot Model (default) when you open the DAX Studio from Excel.

3.Query the MDSchema (you can find al kinds of DMV's on the DMV tab.

       
select MEASURE_NAME, EXPRESSION from $SYSTEM.MDSCHEMA_MEASURES
 

and a printscreen is depicted below:

4. Copy and paste the formulas into Excel
And can copy and paste the formulas in an excel sheet and you can use this also as documentation.

Conclusion

It's a good thing to back up your DAX measures when the underlying datamodel is likely to change. One another point is that you can adopt this method for documenting the worksheet.

Greetz,
Hennie